We’ve come across a few MPA optimizations in the past. So far all the solutions were in terms of a single rectangle. For example we can ask the Bayesian optimizer to find the best rectangular MPA that maximizes profits over 20 years in a scenario where there are too many boats.
The shape depends on the biology, number of boats, etc. However for the scenario I ran this time we get this shape:
A more challenging question would be: if it could be any shape what MPA should we choose? Since the map is a grid, we could really be asking which cell of the map should be closed and which open. Given that the map is 50 by 50 we need to maximize a boolean vector of size 2500. This is quite hard to do with the Bayesian toolchain we got so I am using standard genetic algorithms for it. The result is plain weird: